The Underground Sound of Emerson College
There is something so infinitely personal about Commit This to Memory and Justin Pierre’s writing is so powerful that it still makes it relatable. It’s much more than just a record, also a change of pace for Pierre as a man and Motion City Soundtrack as a band with every member taking care of their own parts, the band sounds much more full from the very first note they all play together.
With the release of their sophomore album, ATLiens, the rap duo would become the progenitors of an otherworldly legacy—one that seems prophetic even on its 30th anniversary. Only now, reality itself seems to have collapsed upon the imaginative fervor of the present. It’s a vein of Afrofuturism that has gone haywire.
Every Sunday, milk crate revisits an iconic piece of music history—artist, album, or otherwise—as a part of our weekly crate digging series. Design by Sophie Parrish BY: GABRIELLE FINUCAN I find myself with an earworm carrying its way through my body on a consistent basis. At my part-time job, I hum to myself a snippet…
I first heard Sezen Aksu in the back of my mom’s minivan. Her song, “Değer Mi,” would play each time someone turned on the CD player, a glittery, synth-heavy pop song with a repeated hook: “Değer mi hiç, Değer mi hiç, Değer mi hiç,” which asks “is it worth it, is it worth it, is it worth it?” As a child, I sang along as best I phonetically could, without knowing how to speak Turkish. I sounded something like “dare me,” an Americanized take on Aksu’s lyricism. It wasn’t until I revisited the album in my junior year of high school that I began to uncover the true meaning of Aksu’s lyrics and see her music as more than just an old song still stuck in my head a decade later.
Exile in Guyville could be a sob story about shitty ex-boyfriends and childhood trauma and bad sex, but Phair doesn’t sing it like she wants your sympathy, or even like she’s particularly upset over the situation. It sounds like she’s resigned herself to it. It’s the tone of voice of a breakup that you’ve known is coming for months, the end of a relationship that you’ve already mourned the loss of by the time the conversation happens, the numbness that comes with deciding not to expect too much. Her vocals are devoid of any flourish or technical stylings, but are instead a monotone that sounds like she’s complaining to you over the phone.
Unlike the steady and booming resurgence of Duster within the past years, Eiafuawn has seen little resurrection outside of smaller spaces. On February 25, 2022, archival record label The Numero Group released deluxe pressings of Birds in the Ground, as well as full Spotify and Bandcamp uploads. But the area that Eiafuawn finds itself in doesn’t need to be large, and the album doesn’t need a cultural revival. It only needs to play in quiet bedrooms and turned-up headphones, existing in the personal and authentic world it cultivates for each listener. 20 years later, Eiafuawn stands as a meaningful record of early 2000s slacker artistry—gloomy and detached yet oh so emotional. Maybe in our own interior worlds, everything is still all fucked up, but in Parton’s world of Birds in the Ground, everything is right.
If soul music had a fairy godmother, it would be Minnie Julia Riperton-Rudolph.
The Bonnie and Clyde of rock ‘n’ roll are Sid Vicious—mediocre-at-best bassist of the Sex Pistols—and Nancy Spungen.
Everything about the Savonlinna-born group’s ethos and aesthetic is drawn from the esoteric, from their uncanny, unexplainable album covers to the magical, free-form quality of their music, which can veer from weightless ambient ballads to chip-tuned psychedelic folk to full-on electronic club-thumpers with minimal downtime. The group often sounds like they’re tethered between this reality and the next, making music that appeals as much faeries as it does to regular human beings — not to mention that nearly every picture of the band looks like it could have — or may have — been taken in a dilapidated woodshed in the dead-center of Lapland.